One of the popular responses to the outcry over HB2 has been to suggest that unisex or single bathrooms are the "answer" or a "middle road" (or "common sense") to avoid conflict over transgender folks using the bathroom that best fits their gender identity. Really, it's a dodge that doesn't solve anything socially, and is logistically and fiscally unrealistic.

First, I would love it if all public spaces had private, single-person bathrooms. Not because I'm in any way uncomfortable with transgender folks — but because I've never really loved public bathrooms to begin with. Who wouldn't prefer to be alone when using the bathroom? (And don't even get me started on urinals…) (More …)

Bike theft here has soared in recent years, up 70 percent from 2006 to 2012, a year in which about 4,035 bicycles were taken, according to the latest estimate by the city.

The rash in thefts owes to the increase of bikers and their fancy two-wheelers. These are not your childhood Schwinns with banana seats, but $1,500 or more (sometimes $10,000) technical marvels, celebrated in this ecologically devout, outdoorsy tech culture like an iPad mated with a Tesla. Bikes can be all too easily snagged from outside offices or inside garages, then resold in flea markets or chopped up and sold piecemeal. Often, the police say, the culprits are drug addicts in need of a quick fix.

We live in a "tough on crime" culture, so it's hard to imagine an objection to punishing people for stealing, right?

But, Zeynep Tufecki wrote a piece that says (in part):

in a city in which inequality is greatly increasing, in which those outside the tech industry are struggling to pay rents and deal with increasing cost of life, and in which flushed, moneyed tech employees are buying more and more expensive bikes (the article notes, can cost $10,000), those police are luring people to steal them by intentionally using bait bikes so expensive that the people tempted to steal them can be charged with felonies. If convicted, so that they can no longer vote in many states, and also are unemployable in large sectors of the economy for all practical reasons.

What could go wrong?

…

Sure, there is a cost to bike theft, and it is a problem. But there is also cost to rendering large numbers of people unemployable through felony convictions.

Now imagine a city in which areas in which tech workers lives were equipped with cameras that caught everyone who ever rolled through a stop sign. You got a felony charge, since the evidence was indisputable. You lost your job, and could never work in the same sector again. You can’t vote either. Maybe you have probation. Your life is ruined, forever, and fairly irrecoverably.

After a long-running thread on Twitter, I thought about this last night a bit more. I still disagree strongly with the comparison between rolling a stop sign and bike theft. Bike theft is intentional harm against another person, and every single time it has negative consequences for the victim and is an act of intent against another person.

Tufekci's arguments about creating a larger population of felons only applies if people continue to steal bikes. If the program is a successful deterrent, then it's a win. And, unlike locking people up for drug use, I have little problem punishing thieves. You want to smoke weed, snort coke, or shoot heroin? It's your body. You want to steal my bike? Enjoy jail, jerkface.

But, but, but… there are other issues here.

One, it's happening in San Francisco, where there's a huge gap in incomes between the tech community and the rest of the community. (And, presumably, the landlord / property owner community…) It's legitimately becoming harder for some of the non-tech community to scrape by.

Two, I sympathize with Tufekci's point about "creating felons" in that there's a huge problem for people leaving prison in finding a job and going straight after being tagged with a felony.

In the past few years, I don't think a week has gone by without someone exhorting me to sign an electronic petition of some sort. Usually these are excellent causes and very well-meaning people who want to change the world… so long as it doesn't involve actually having to put pen to paper, go anywhere, etc.

I've seen little evidence that people take these electronic petitions very seriously. I suppose there's little to lose in signing one, except that it may substitute for "doing something" in the minds of people who care about a cause, and it replaces actually writing a letter, making a phone call, or even protesting or showing up in person to make a statement. Granted, you'll only be able to mobilize a small fraction of the people who'd sign an electronic petition, but that small fraction may make more of a difference than a mob of digital signatures.

People love to bag on our educational system these days, but most of the solutions I see proposed seem to radically miss the point. The Atlantic has a short piece that gets a little closer to solving a piece of the problem: The ridiculous over-emphasis of sports in education.

"The Case Against Sports in High School," looks at the difference in sports in American high schools versus the rest of the world. We spend an inordinate amount of money on sports programs for high schools, and to what end? They only benefit a small number of students, and even the students that are part of sporting programs rarely derive any real lasting benefits from the programs – and even less educational benefit from the programs.

I find this from the article particularly galling:

To cut costs, the district had already laid off eight employees and closed the middle-school campus, moving its classes to the high-school building; the elementary school hadn’t employed an art or a music teacher in years; and the high school had sealed off the science labs, which were infested with mold. Yet the high school still turned out football, basketball, volleyball, track, tennis, cheerleading, and baseball teams each year.

Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year. But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.

Cut the arts, seal off the science labs, but keep the sports programs. WTF?

As also touched on in the article, the focus on athletics doesn't even extend to the entire student body or really even the student athletes after graduation. We focus on sports and winning, not the actual health benefits of being athletic or trying to help the entire student body be healthy. It's a little ironic how much our culture is focused on sports while simultaneously being extremely unhealthy and overweight.

Next time someone starts talking about fixing our educational system, suggest re-routing the money we spend on sports to education and see how that goes.

A few years ago, I came late to The Wire, but caught up quickly. Usually I'm not one to buy the hype for television series, but I had to admit that The Wire was every bit as powerful, funny, and eye-opening as its fans claimed. It's a show that you tell friends "you need to watch this" rather than "you'll really enjoy it," because they really doneed to watch it.

The Wire is necessary because it actually provides a glimpse into the reality of ground zero in the War on Drugs – a topic that any person (at least in the U.S.) should be well-educated on, but probably is not. And if The Wire is required watching, the book that preceded and inspired it should be required reading. It should be required reading, starting in jr. high if not sooner.

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, by David Simon and Edward Burns, is as gripping and compelling as any work of fiction I've ever read. But it has the virtue of being a true story, and true journalism. Simon and Burns spent months getting to know the subjects in the book, then a solid year following their lives on the corner. Interviews, observation, and follow-ups after the year was over.

The Corner gives a first-hand look at what life is like for those living in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in the United States. It provides a look at what growing up in poverty is really like, and why it's not just as simple as "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." It might surprise people to learn that the corner that Simon and Burns chose is near the birthplace of H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore. The world of Mencken and the world of teen drug slingers and desperate dope fiends are separated only by a few decades and less than a mile.

And The Corner tells the tale from the beginning. Simon and Burns cover the scope of Baltimore's downfall, from the early 1900s when the McCullough family first settled into Baltimore, through four generations of McCulloughs. From stand-up citizen and family man, to his fallen son who essentially abandons his son to pursue his addiction, to a teen who plays at slinging drugs and fathers his own son while still too young to drive. This is how fast our cities decay.

You'll find some hope, but not much, at the end of the book. The book is set in 1994, and published in 1997. More than a decade and a half later, we know how the story goes for many of the people in the book.

As a work of journalism, I'm simply in awe. We need so much more of this. I can't say that I "loved" the book in the same way I enjoy a good book of fiction or entertaining non-fiction. After 500+ pages, I was ready to leave this world behind and only regretted that there isn't more of Simon's work out there to take on next. (Simon has only two books to his name, this and Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.) This book is a five out of five stars, perhaps six. It should certainly be required reading for anyone who aspires to have an opinion about the war on drugs or welfare policy in the United States.

It was hard to miss reference to Margaret Thatcher's death this morning. No doubt the TV "news" shows were covering it, but who watches those anymore? I found out, as I usually learn about events these days, about Thatcher's death via Twitter.

What's unusual about Thatcher's death is the fact that so many people are celebrating, rather than mourning, her death.

The usual cycle of commentary has ensued: event -> initial commentary -> response of annoyance or outrage at initial commentary -> annoyance, outrage, or explanations in response to the response -> etc.

Essentially "don't tell me what to say" vs. "not every thought needs to be expressed at every moment."

I'm not sure there's a right answer to this, though I generally fall on the side of giving respect to the dead except in extreme cases. (Sorry, I don't feel bad at expressing pleasure when learning Osama bin Laden was dead, nor when I heard about Saddam Hussein, and when Charles Manson finally expires I'll feel justified in saying "good riddance.") Thatcher and many political figures are borderline. Would Thatcher have governed any differently if she'd known she'd be publicly reviled by many after her death? If not, is it useful to "celebrate" her death when it goes against the social grain?

I also wonder if the people who shame the celebrants are truly concerned about propriety, or simply don't want to hear from "the opposition." And would the celebrants feel differently if one of their leaders were dead? No doubt many of those wagging fingers today will be reacting differently when Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter dies.

I don't mourn Thatcher, but I can't quite bring myself to find joy in her demise, either.